The Monsoon – The wonderful gift of nature to the humanity…the dark grey rising clouds, the rampaging winds, the roaring thunders, the drenching showers!…Beautiful minds at creationt…Love-stricken hearts in passion…and the nature in lush green exuberance…O Monsoon; you’re the true elixir to the human life!

Green…Green…Green

Just Born…to bask in the Sun

Pink in Green

The nature showers its blessings without asking…it knows who needs what and when…it’s only man that, in its avarice and insolence, meddles with the rule and brings misery for itself and others.

Respect the rules of nature and basak in the exuberance of Monsoon…ENJOY!!!

Siddhanta Sharan had a very wanting childhood which had come to him as the tragic legacy of a faded aristocracy. Through the thick of his penurious childhood days in his village, he studied at his village school where everyone knew he was special. Meandering through the difficulties of his life he gets few helps which enables him to reach higher academic echelons and get many academic laurels on the way. Soon, recognition came and so did job offers worth millions of dollars in compensation. But, he was not to freak out on those money nor he wished to sit on his laurels for long; he was dreaming of a different and more meaningful future.

Wandering around with his inner turmoil, he lands into the Harvard Business School drawn by the rigours of a management programme. Just then, he hears of a bloody massacre happened in the neighboured of his village as fall-out of a long-standing struggle between private armies of the landed castes and the Maoists. He thinks of a solution and, quitting Harvard mid-way, he comes back to his village. Now, he had defined himself and his goals; it was the call of his destinity. He flew down from Harvard to his village – one of the most underdeveloped region in the hinterlands of Ganges – and rolls out his unique solution that he calls ‘Nano-socionomics’.

Within a span of three years, he turns the whole area into a hot-bed of development, growth and prosperity, thanks to his great postulates of ‘Nano-socionomics’ that visualized the socio-economic reconstruction of the villages through truly democratic means. To top it, by his unique skills, he manages to bridge the status differentiation of rural society and ensures total caste-equality in areas under his influence.

His unbelievable achievements make Maoism and caste wars fade into irrelevance. He is hailed in national-international media as the ‘Miracle Man’ and is honoured with many prestigious awards. The Maoists retaliate and abduct him but, with his profound intellectual capacity and with his great argumentative skills, Siddhanta managed an ideological coup in the Maoist camp leading not only to the annihilation of the Maoists’ top rank but also to the ideological defeat of the very philosophy of Maoism in India.

Now he focussed himself to a far bigger challenge – the reconstruction of Indian democracy and society. He was blessed to have the company of Aditya, the maverick educationist, who joined hands with him to open ‘The Ara Club’, the secret club. Aditya also brought Devanjali into the mission and soon they were working out a road map. But, Siddhanta was planning a movement full with wonderful ideas of change; he calls it a Post-Gandhian’ movement. Soon, the movement snowballed into a pan-Indian revolution. The waves of the revolution not only swept away the corrupt government of the day but went a long way into rejuvenating the tattered moral fabric of the nation.

The revolution has a beautiful culmination – the volunteers of the Ara Club are voted into power for implementing their great reforms. As the nation is through huge celebrations all across, Siddhanta Sharan was no where to be seen.

Where was Siddhanta at the time? What he was doing in a remote village alone? What does he tell Devanjali about that particular moment and about his conspicuous absence from the celebration? What was it that made Devanjali go speechless?

Sitting in her news room, she acknowledged that in his moral and intellectual endowments, Siddhanta Sharan was still several notches above the rest of them.

He was SIDDHANTA SHARANA – a profound, subtle, enigmatic and discerning character whose ideological complexities and behavioural simplicity would blow you off your feet…

Keep following the post for further exerpts from upcoming fiction, ‘DEMOCRACY 2.0.’

There are many people in the world who are underachievers, like the butterfly in the picture here; they haven’t got what they deseved. Remember, the world doesn’t care for underschievers, nor is it kind to them.

Most of us remain contended with what we have. At times, we simply don’t care for the opportunities lying in front of us; maybe, we’re too afraid to take the plunge or maybe we get bogged down by our innumerable analysis, a great many of which happen to be unnecessary.

Like the butterfly, endowed with the strenghth to spread its wing and to fly to the beautiful twig lying ahead, we must identify our real strength and build upon it to achieve the best of the world we deserve.

What do you say?

(The picture was taken on 20th August, 2012 by my daughter Ananyaa in the park at the front of our house)

Meet ADITYA SRIVASTAVA, one of the two male protagonists who play the centre role in the story.

Aditya Srivastava, born and brought up in a traditional family at a north-Indian small town, lives his childhood amidst a rich and culturally fulfilling family atmosphere, full with siblings and caring individuals. Fed on the romantic notions of the civil services since his childhood, IAS happens to be his natural, and family-inspired, choice.

As he grows up, he is sent to Delhi University to prepare for the civil services examination where he soon becomes a popular name in the students circle. However, what he didn’t know was that by choosing the path of Civil Services, he had chosen a path of self-destruction till he meets with Devanjali, a girl from St Stephens, whose perspicacity at her age was a matter of folklores. Through her powerful analysis, she tries to convince him that IAS is not the solution; rather, it is a part of the problem. Very naturally, it clashed with Aditya’s small-town romanticism about the civil service. Aditya is in a fix. Yet, he goes ahead with his Mission-IAS. But, he’s overawed by the charm and intellectual prowess of Devanjali and falls secretly in love with her.

Eventually, Aditya is selected in IAS as the all-India topper, but before he could think of joining it, he gets a crude personal experience which jolts him out of his romanticism.

Now, that he has perceived the reality, he conceives a plan – a secret plan, to destroy this reality. He just needed few good men to execute his secret mission. He works out his strategies of a systemic change and prepares a detailed roadmap in his secret ARA CLUB that he sets up with his another maveric mate, Siddhanta. On the surface, he establishes himself in the society as a super-successful entrepreneur who is hailed as the ‘Education Baron of India’ and, more interestingly, the ‘Success Guru’.

However, before he could realize his secret mission, he gets drawn into a great socio-political crisis of the day – ‘Reservation’. After leading a student’s movement, he gets into the bottom of the problem and with his in-depth analysis he comes up with a novel solution that creates positive stir in society. He implements his solution through his secret network and the results are revolutionary. He becomes a hero and earns tremendous media support.

The politics of the day is mired by scams, scandals and controversies of unprecedented level. The govt of the day is bogged down by trust-deficit. Political scandals and sting operations are the order of the day. This backdrop gives Aditya and his team a right setting to bring forth their political agenda and they come up with their unique political and electoral reform proposals. People, fed up with scandals and let down by the existing political formations, give Aditya and his team a huge thumbs up.

The elections are round the corner. Aditya’s team is riding the wave of huge mass support. But, what will happen? Will the govt of the day keep quite? Well, they let the man corner the people’s goodwill or will they press the govt machinery to defame the man and to send him in political wilderness?

What role Devanjali gets to play in the drama? Can she do anything to save the man from incarceration and conspiracies? Can she let ‘Her Man’ sink to the quagmire of dirty politics? On top of it, can she get to say her passionate love for the man who she had once created as ‘the leader’?

Meet DEVANJALI, the female lead of my upcoming novel, “DEMOCRACY 2.0”. She’s a kind of a character that you might not have come across ever in your life – whether in literature, cinema or television.

There are few men and women on this planet who lead their lives with a mission. They carry a dream and display singular commitment to implement that dream in its totality. That commitment gives them a character that makes them special. Devanjali is one such special character.

But, what makes Devanjali special is her integrity. She’s uncompromising on a cause which she believes in and even the biggest of temptations can’t sway her – not even the might of the powerful Vikram Thapar, the biggest Moughal of the Indian media industry, who happens to be her employer.

Coming from an aristocratic lineage, she had a luxurious but melancholic childhood. With circumstances, she acquires her own ideas of life which makes her independent but headstrong. Even her IAS father, who happens to be one of the most powerful bureaucrats of his time, fails to convince her of his own importance in the system. Through her gifted power of discernment, she had understood the real character of the modern bureaucracy and the ills it had imported into the system. She was determined to stay away from it and hence, to the utter dismay of her father, she chooses journalism as her career and through it, she vows to create powerful leaders in society. She nurtures her own secret missions in life and needs few persons of character to execute her mission.

After studying journalism from USA, she comes back to India nurturing her two-fold mission: first, to create and promote real leaders in society and second, to cleanse the Indian media industry of its dirt and muck. She joins the biggest and the most controversial media house of India, the Newswire Ltd. To many in the industry the news happens to be scandalous. Then, nobody knew that it was a part of her long-term secret plan.

But, to her jubilation, Devanjali soon finds that the mission for reconstruction of the Indian democracy and society had already begun by few men with exceptional characters and that she she had already been made a part of it. The heroes of her dreams had taken lives.

With the mission of reconstruction of Indian politics and society well under way, Devanjali directs her focus on Vikram Thapar and on the affairs of the ‘Newswire Ltd’. Soon, she discovers an intricate network of dirty interests ensnaring the system where politicians, business houses, opinion leaders and lobbyists had held the political-bureaucratic system of India to a ransom. She finds that Vikram Thapar and his media house had its own intelligent role to play in the game. Now, her task was cut out; she would destroy the man and the ills he’d infused in the system. With her persistence and strong-headed approach, she exposes the nexus and, before she could fight Vikram Thapar legally, the man found a safer and a far more respectable escape route out of his desperate situation – suicide; he kills himself which symbolizes the cleansing act of all dirty influences in media. Her giant act sends a powerful message to the media fraternity that when it comes to fighting corruption in its own backyard, the media houses can’t keep their heads buried in sand.

Now, that her personal mission is fulfilled, will Devanjali get the opportunity to express her love for the man, who she had once created and who comes out to be the real hero of the great movement for the reconstruction of democratic India?